Don't Get Over It: Honoring the In-betweens in Our Lives

Ever heard of "Frog Crossing?" It's my daughter's favorite computer game. Elise sits glued to the computer as she helps a little frog cross a six-lane superhighway, dodging speeding semis. If she is skillful enough, she can zip him across quickly and avoid the frog's untimely death by splattering. The obvious point of the game, given the terrible dangers of the highway, is to get from one curb to the opposite one absolutely as quickly as possible.

Anyone trying to navigate an important life transition such as divorce, vocational change, serious illness, or midlife is in the same unenviable position as Elise's poor frog. Our culture gives us impossible operating instructions for change, similar to the rules for Frog Crossing: after you've left behind the old, head for the new post-haste. Our speedy, product-not-process oriented culture tells us that if we're leaving something behind, we better know where we're going, and get there, fast .

The trouble is that important transitions take time: there is almost always an in-between time when you've left behind your old way of being in the world, your old beliefs and dreams, and you've not yet moved into the new. This in-between time is a time of not knowing, a time of incubating your life-to-be.

Our culture's fear of in-betweenness stands in marked contrast to indigenous cultures who have important ways of marking profound life transitions, or rites of passage. This middle stage in a rite of passage-called "liminal" by anthropologists, after the Greek word for "threshold"-is the "betwixt and between" time, after the initiate has left behind the old way of being in the world, and before he or she takes on a new role and identity. The liminal stage is honored as the most sacred and important in tribal rites of passage, acknowledged as the time when the initiate, stripped of former roles and self, is most open to transformation.

Being Liminal

Barbara Fischer understands liminality: as a woman suffering from fibromyalgia, and as a psychotherapist helping others deal with chronic pain and illness, she has thought long and hard about being in between. Fischer recalls that when she first began to deal with the chronic pain and fatigue of her illness, she tried hard to deny how radically her life had changed. "A real despair set in," Fischer remembers, when she finally acknowledged the loss of her old life. "We're so used to controlling and planning our lives. In liminality, all that goes out the window; it's a time without the ability to plan. I had lost my past, but didn't have a future, because of all the uncertainties involved in chronic illness."

Peter Wallis, an educator who leads rites of passage for adolescents, was literally plunged into liminality as the result of a skiing accident, falling several hundred feet while climbing a steep snow cornice. "I didn't know it at that moment, but this was the beginning of a profound liminal time for me. In one fell swoop I had to let go of my youthful heroic self, which had been such a powerful guiding image for me as a man. Suddenly, I was faced with my own mortality, the result of pushing beyond appropriate limits for my older self. I had to leave behind my youth, and begin preparing to move into elderhood."

We move into liminality during any major change when our old ways of looking at the world, old dreams, old life patterns don't work any more. "Whenever we participate in something that will change us, and change how others relate to us-as when we marry, are inducted into the armed forces or ordained, become a doctor, or survive an ordeal-that experience is a liminal one," writes Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen in her latest book, Close to the Bone: Illness and the Soul . We cross a threshold, she writes, and are presented with an opportunity to experience liminality as an invitation to transformation: "Here the mystical, spiritual, or psychic awareness of what is happening determines its significance as a soul experience."

Being liminal is akin to a snake shedding its skin, a common symbol both in tribal rites of passage and in many contemporary liminal persons' dreams. In order to make space for the new, we must shed the old, too-tight skin of our old lives.

Kathleen Brehony, in Awakening to Midlife , suggests that another symbol-that of the chrysalis stage in the life cycle of a butterfly-resembles liminality in four ways. First, she writes, the caterpillar must be sacrificed in order for the butterfly to be born: the old self must be sacrificed in order for a deeper level of self and soul to be born. Second, the experience within the chrysalis is that of solitude and isolation: withdrawal from the usual way of being in the world. Third, there is a slow gestation period that can neither be hurried or circumvented. Finally, according to Brehony, chrysalis or liminal time is "an opening, a doorway through which we can more clearly touch the Divine, transpersonal, and nonrational aspects of being."

Fear and Denial

Given the rewards of acknowledging liminality, why is American culture so afraid of it? Why does it seem that our society has adopted W.H. Auden's line, "We would rather be ruined than changed," as its motto?

Our culture is afraid of death, claims Michael Meade, ritualist and co-editor of Crossroads: the Quest for Contemporary Rites of Passage . "Rebirth always passes through the doors of death; we need to acknowledge that for the new to come, something has to die. The purpose of a rite of passage is to become more alive by dying to the old. When our culture denies death, we cannot become more alive through liminality."

American society, Meade also notes, is afraid of alive, passionate, idiosyncratic people. "Rites of passage are about becoming real, and enlivened, and self-knowing. Our society just can't handle that. Can you imagine IBM celebrating this? They can't; they need workers ."

Finally, we live in an instant culture: credit cards, fast food, weekend seminars that "change your life." We want it all, now. Unfortunately, profound transformation rarely is accomplished in days or even weeks. Many rites of passage, such as midlife, can take months or even years to navigate. When you can take "happy drugs" and feel better almost immediately, why take the harder road of surrendering to the process of death and rebirth?

How ironic that our culture denies liminality, even as it, and indeed global culture, is deeply liminal! "We are at the threshold of a new era; humanity is entering a whole new phase which has no historical precedent," notes David Spangler, teacher and author of The Call . "The speed of technological change, the globalization of the economy, the radical convergence of cultures, the ways we are interacting with our world ecologically: there is no way that we can understand what the consequences will be. There's a big question mark, a huge mystery as to where we are heading."

We are liminal as a nation and a world as we head toward the millennium; we're going to be liminal for quite a while, for millenniums historically are like stretched-out thresholds. The result of this, notes Peter Wallis, who gives workshops on liminality as a result of his own experience, is that "even if we aren't liminal in our personal lives, we'll feel that way as a result of living in a liminal culture. It would be very hard to live in this country and not feel the undercurrents of insecurity and anxiety that accompany such profound change."

It is a shame, he adds, that we seem to have such difficulty-both as individuals and as a culture-acknowledging and honoring liminality. This stage is the most crucial one in a tribal rite of passage, Wallis says, for it "provides a ritualistic container for the death of the old self. In that receptive, vulnerable place the initiate is given contact with the sacred myths and spiritual traditions of the tribe, allowing for profound personal and spiritual transformation. This important time allows the initiate to draw nourishment from the deep soil of the unconscious for the gestation and emergence of a new self."

Yet people in our culture do find ways to experience the trials and gifts of liminality. In order to reap the gifts of in-betweenness, five areas need to be addressed: finding support; making conscious contact with the Sacred; honoring solitude; learning surrender; grieving the old and celebrating the new.

Support

The need for support and authentic community is paramount during liminality. To find trusted others, or even one other with whom you can feel safe in sharing your uncertainties, your grief, your dreams is very important. "Seek the company of wise people who know something about this process," encourages Barbara Fischer. "Advice is so cheap, and you get so much of it when you're liminal. Our culture is so frightened of liminality that most people just have this knee-jerk response: do this, do this, do this...If they haven't been through this stage themselves, they immediately try to "solve' it for you. It's so important to find people who know, really know, what it's like to wander around in the dark,"

The "others" can be friends, support group, family, therapist, minister. Being in-between can take a long time, and having others who support you and encourage you to take the time it takes can be real lifesavers. Louise Mahdi, Jungian analyst and editor of Betwixt and Between: Masculine and Feminine Patterns of Initiation , believes in the importance of having a trusted confidante with whom you feel safe because you know that he or she has "been there", a guide for this unknown territory.

We don't seem to be hard wired to do this alone. Finding trusted others to journey with can be one of the great gifts of this time. In my own practice as a therapist, many clients have told me that discovering that they didn't have to do the night journey alone has been one of the greatest gifts of the process.

Contact with the Sacred

Our relationship to time changes during liminality, says David Spangler, bringing with it both insecurity and the great gift of opening to the Sacred. Normally we are in a state of being spread out in time: part of us is in the past, part in the present, part in the future. However, when we are liminal, he explains, "the past and future part of our time-bodies get lopped off: now the past isn't applicable, and we're not sure at all what the future holds. We can feel amputated and insecure." However, the gift in this is that "we're not lopped off from the present; time collapses into the present moment, which is where all spiritual and mystical disciplines say it should be anyway."

When past and future fall away, when we are left, vulnerable, in the present moment, we are open to the embrace of the Sacred in a way that is impossible during non-liminal, hurried, directed time. That open, in-between space, claims Spangler, is actually "homologous with the spiritual experience, though when I've lost my job or my marriage has dissolved, I may not at first see it as a deeply spiritual experience. But if I can stay with the present moment and its uncertainties, it will take me to a deeper place; engaging with the mystery of in-betweenness can be used as a spiritual practice."

While caught up in the whirl of our everyday lives, we rarely have the need to open to the Sacred in such a vulnerable way. When we have been stripped of old dreams, old relationships, our past and our future, opening to the Sacred can be like finding the proverbial oasis in the desert, water for the thirsty. Peter Wallis claims that what is most needed during liminality is "a willingness to turn inward, to seek support and guidance from a higher power, whatever that means to each individual. By contacting the Sacred when one is so vulnerable, one learns trust at the deepest level possible, trust in the process and trust in life."

Solitude and Soul-work

Just as a bear hibernates during winter, so is drawing inward necessary during this winter-stillness of liminality, descending into the "soul-realm" of dreams, images, Big Questions about the meaning of one's life. During liminality, writes Jean Shinoda Bolen, "the soul realm is a place of great inner richness...This is the psychological layer that contains the potentials we have not developed, the talents and inclinations that once mattered to us...the deep core of meaning that dreams and creativity draw from. Here are the wellsprings of the soul."

During tribal rites of passage liminal initiates work with their dreams, since Big Dreams- dreams that could give the initiates meaning and direction for the next stage of their life- would be dreamed at this time. Louise Mahdi stresses that this happens to us as well, and underscores the importance of attending to liminal dreams. "An ordinary dream," she says," is like a little flashlight that can guide you through a night or two. A Big Dream, which occurs so often during liminal time, is like the beacon of a lighthouse, shining out far over the waters so that one can see for some distance, over the next several months or years or even the next chapter of one's life."

Just as turning inward is required for dreaming Big Dreams, so is it needed for asking Big Questions. As we shed our past self-definitions and life patterns, our future opens up in new ways, and we have an opportunity to ask questions that many of us have not asked since adolescence: Who am I? Where am I going? Why am I here? A turning point for Barbara Fischer occurred when-after months of working with doctors to cure her fibromyalgia- she consulted a new doctor who didn't asked the usual questions. "He asked me instead, 'What does your soul need?'" says Fischer. "I had been working so hard on my body, but nothing was helping. His question shifted the whole context for me. It didn't make any difference in my actual experience of pain, but I held the pain radically differently because there was a larger context for it. A whole new life emerged for me when I stopped and asked what my soul needed."

For people who are liminal, asking Big Questions allows new visions for their lives to emerge from the emptiness of waiting. "During this time of great mystery," says Michael Meade, "the most important questions to be asked are, "What is dying? And what is trying to be born?"

Cultivating Surrender

'Surrender' is a dirty word in our culture: we are trained, it seems from birth, to be in control. Liminality strips that away that illusion of control; letting go of the old self, and not knowing who will emerge, takes the wind out of our sails. To surrender during liminality does not mean giving up. Rather, it means finding ways to say "Yes" to the transition you are in, and all that you are experiencing in that transition: saying yes to not-knowing, saying yes to the present moment, saying yes to the radical opening to the Sacred.

When Barbara Fischer holds retreats for those struggling with chronic pain and illness, she opens with this story: One day a person went to Buddha and asked, "What can I do? I am starving. There is no chance of finding anything to eat." Buddha replied, "Fast."

The difference between starving and fasting, says Fischer, is surrender: "It's about taking responsibility for where you are and saying, 'I'll stop fighting this process and I'll open myself fully to what it has to offer me.' It's about learning trust in the process of liminality. So often, when the Sacred tells us to let go, we say, "Do you have any other ideas?" Surrender is about making that open space, that crack in the cosmic egg, for the sacred, for new life, to pour through."

Grieving the old, celebrating the new

Death and birth go hand in hand in liminality. Indeed, in tribal rites of passage, initiates are often placed in caves or partially buried in the earth, showing them that the tomb of their old life has become the womb of their new one. "When you can be liminal," says Michael Meade, "and sit in the shadow-the dark parts, the loss-the new that emerges has so much greater depth, because it comes up from the earth, the incredible depths of the burial places." Meade loves to quote an old tribal proverb about rites of passage: "You can only go as far forward as you can reach backward."

Going backward by grieving what has passed away makes room to go forward, allowing space for new dreams and new life to emerge. During liminality, particularly as one moves toward rebirth-the third and final stage in a rite of passage-small births make themselves known through new visions, new relationships, new tasks. "In the liminal time, you get new images and visions for one's life to be lived in a new way," says Louise Mahdi. "These new visions and dreams are like endangered species: they need to be nourished and protected so that the inner self can guide us into new life."

Liminality and therapy

In a culture that denies liminality, therapy has provided a safe place for those in-between, where a person could grieve the old, be supported in "not-knowing", and play with new possibilities. For a person pregnant with new life, therapy, and therapist, could act as midwife. Therapy, especially longer therapy at its finest, has provided a holding environment for people in transition, giving them permission to "take as long as it takes," rather than pressuring them, as the culture does, to hurry up and get it over with.

In the present era of managed care and freely prescribed Prozac, therapy as a haven for those in transition has become endangered. I recently began seeing a client, thrown into a profound midlife transition in the aftermath of a divorce, who called herself a refugee from managed care. Given six sessions by her company, she saw a therapist who told her problem was depression, prescribed an antidepressant, and was given "tips" on how to feel good. She knew in her bones that her "problem" was not depression, but of birthing a new self and a new life, and wisely walked away from his office.

Managed care is effective for certain conditions. Liminality is not one of them. "The managed care model is extremely inappropriate for liminality," contends Barbara Fischer. "Symptom-focused six week therapy is not going to help someone who is liminal at all. When you get a therapist who's trying to 'fix' someone in a short amount of time, it's irrelevant, totally, to this stage of growth. You can't grieve losses, ritualize that grief, befriend solitude, open to the sacred, dream new dreams-all vitally important therapeutic issues for liminality-in six sessions."

Therapy-"old style therapy"-will continue to be a haven for those who are liminal, providing safe space for the rich, slow, often agonizing and always deeply rewarding work that allows a new self, and a new life, to arise from the ashes of the old.

Gifts of liminality

However you journey through liminality, you will at some point enter the third stage of your rite of passage: rebirth. It is often not until after rebirth that the gifts of liminality can be appreciated.

Rebirth for a chronically ill person, for instance, is not necessarily the regaining of their old state of health. "Other things were born instead," recalls Barbara Fischer. "I began to have new ideas, find new things that gave me joy. My creativity flourished. I thought of new ways to work. New ideas began to come out of my experiences of being liminal, ideas and dreams I never had before, that didn't depend upon the recovery of my old self: this is how my retreats were born."

The flourishing of creativity that Fischer experienced as a result of being liminal is one of the most important gifts of liminality. David Spangler believes that the in-between time can be the most creative period of a person's life. Often, he says, our creativity comes out of reshaping what we already know. The creativity that arises from liminality is of an entirely different order. "It's a still place," explains Spangler, "where I may feel somewhat empty and insecure, because I no longer have access to ways of thinking and perceiving that are familiar. That open space can be very, very fertile, because new things arise from it that are not re-formations of something I already know or have done. It's quite remarkable; there is no way of predicting what will emerge."

Another gift is the deepening of one's spiritual life. "Liminality improves your spiritual life tremendously," notes Fischer. "The encounter with the Sacred can truly happen, in a very real way, in liminality. There is room to be touched and engaged by something much bigger than yourself when you stand still."

Deepened contact with the Sacred leads, as well, to a new confidence in the cycles of life. "You learn that what looks like death ain't necessarily so," one client told me after a long midlife passage. "There's something always being born out of that death: not something changed, but something entirely new." To allow oneself to be liminal for as long as it takes, and to experience rebirth flowing naturally from that, gives a person great confidence in dealing with other challenges life presents. "By having to let go of my youth, my heroic way of being in the world, before I could move into the new rhythms and wisdom of elderhood," Peter Wallis discovered, "I gained such a deep understanding that something new cannot be born until the old truly dies away."

Authentically honoring a liminal passage brings small miracles: new gifts of creativity, of receptivity to life and the Sacred, new joy and energy. Liminality is not a stage to be endured with gritted teeth, moved through as quickly as possible. If liminality can be embraced, says David Spangler, "Out of it will come new perceptions, new images, new awarenesses that will help me grow and prosper in ways that my old patterns couldn't. Accept the uncertainty, the unknown. Engage it. Use that openness to go to deeper places in spirit and life. Do anything you can to make this time your ally."

Make liminality your ally and new life, authentic life, will be yours at the end of your transition. David Whyte, a Whidbey Island poet, celebrated this in his poem "Tilicho Lake":

In this high place
it is as simple as this,
leave everything you know behind.

Step toward the cold surface,
say the old prayer of rough love
and open both arms.

Those who come with empty hands
will stare into the lake astonished,
there, in the cold light
reflecting pure snow

the true shape of your own face.

Reprinted from Common Ground, April 1996